Words Of Wisdom

PEDRO ALMODOVAR That is why my advice to anyone who wants to make films is to make them, even if they don't know
how. They'll learn by doing it, in the most vibrant and organic way possible.

MARTIN SCORSESE
OF course, you may find that the biggest problem of young filmmakers
is that they have nothing to say. At the risk of sounding redundant,
I think the duty of the a filmmaker is to tell the story that he or
she wants to tell, which means that you have to know what the hell
you are talking about.

CLAUDE SAUTET
In other words, a film is a dream, but it's a dream made up of
reality.

JOHN BOORMAN
In terms of visual grammar, for me, the spatial relationship
between the characters is the vital thing. If characters are
emotionally close, I bring them together, If they're distant, I
separate them.

MICHAEL CHAPMAN
But what you really should be thinking about is how to do a
scene as efficiently as possible, as quickly as possible, and as
intelligently as possible. Much of what people think of as art
is actually just the intelligent solution of technical problems.

ROBERT MCKEE
If the scene is about what the scene is about, you're in deep shit.

SYDNEY POLLACK
The only way you can make films for an audience is to make them
for yourself. You have to use yourself as a reference.

JEAN-PIERRE JEUNET
You make a film for yourself. That is an absolute necessity.

JOHN WOO
In any case, I tend to rely on only two kinds of lenses to
compose my frames: very wide angle and extreme telephoto. I use
the wide angle because when I want to see something, I want to
see it completely with the most detail possible. As for the
telephoto, I use it for close-ups because I find it creates a
"real" encounter with the actor. Anything in between is of no
interest to me.

TIM BURTON
On the other hand, I tend to subscribe to the idea that, in a
sense, you're always making the same film over and over again.
You are who you are; your personality is usually the consequence
of what you went through during your childhood, and you spend
your life, consciously or not, rehashing the same ideas over and
over again.

JOE SIMONI'd rather see a well-composed static shot
than a moving shot that makes no sense.

JOHN MC TIERNAN
Whether it's the right way to construct things or not, it's personal. This is my own reaction to seeing too many things that were strung together on illusion.
It's sort of a collorary to trying to keep the space is that you don't cut.
That you have as few cuts as possible. Kubrick did, I think, that there are fewer than 500 cuts in Clockwork Orange.

MILOS FORMANThe aim is to tell the truth without being boring. That's why
lies are so successful, because the truth can be pretty boring---because that's the truth.

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCII enjoy not doing the same thing. I like intimate movies like
Last Tango
in Paris or Besieged to have an epic flavour. In the same way, I like male actors to have
something feminine about them and actresses to have something masculine.

ANG LEEWhen I'm working on a script with James Schamus, I always force him to
come up with one word to sum up the essence of a scene or a movie---to sum up the core emotional
feeling or taste of the movie.

STEVEN SODERBERGHI think Traffic works for people because it looks and feels like it's going
on right in front of you, and that means shooting available light with hand-held cameras. The reason I'm
drawn to this approach is that I feel that if you are going to do something that is lifelike,
then it will be inherently self-renewing because life changes, and so if you keep to the idea
of trying to capture life as it happens, then your talent won't desert you, whereas with any
other style, you know you'll run to a dead end.

ROMAN POLANSKITo conclude, it's all really about storytelling. I think you have to
know how to tell a story. It doesn't matter whether it's a movie or a joke over dinner. There are
people who start telling a joke, and you cringe. Others open their mouths and you're hanging on
their every word.

I am mainly an invisible witness to events and my camera
follows me.

TAKESHI KITANOOften what makes comedy funny is to give the audience something very
familiar to them, something very ordinary, and then all of the sudden put something unexpected
in there. That's what makes people laugh. So if you apply that to the violent scenes in my
films, you know it happens in the most unlikely situations. That gives it a stronger impact
than a setting where you would expect there to be a lot of violence.

JEAN-LUC GODARDFilm is truth 24 times a second, and every cut is a lie.

KAREL REISZ AND GAVIN MILLERWhat (Humphrey) Jennings seems to have realized was that, to express ideas of a certain complexity, it is not possible to rely on pictures alone. If an
idea is to be raised, then it must be done in the first instance in words.